In case you’re wondering how irrational Australia’s business leaders are, consider the current position of business lobby groups on the simultaneous surges of COVID and flu.
The context: widespread sick leave is stretching a job market already plagued by worker shortages across most industries. Employers are being warned that raging respiratory illnesses will inflict growing rates of absenteeism.
The response from business: workers must be prevented from working from home and prevented from wearing masks. As they lined up to tell Nine newspapers: the inevitable Jennifer Westacott of the Business Council thinks working from home would “stifle our recovery and cripple small business”. Australian Industry Group Victoria thinks working from home would “undermine the really good effort that employers and employees have made”.
As for mask mandates, they would “be absolutely counter-productive”.
So, keep going to work, and no mask mandates at any cost. A recipe for everyone to get infected at work, because employers still have the command-and-control mentality that views working from home as an assault on productivity and teamwork — one that will in turn lead to higher rates of absenteeism, which in some cases may force businesses to close.
Better sick workers working where you can see them to healthy ones working from home, evidently.
Meanwhile Home Affairs continues to struggle to process temporary worker visa applications despite swinging more resources to the task amid massive delays.
The Grattan Institute proposed a straightforward solution in March: open up all jobs to temporary worker visa categories as long as they’re paid more than $70,000 a year, indexed, with the visas being portable from employer to employer; and a dramatic simplification of the requirements, paperwork and costs of sponsoring a visa, including the abolition of the labour market testing requirement. Visa holders above a certain income level would be offered a path to permanent residency.
A key driver of that report was that widespread concerns about temporary visa categories being used to exploit workers and push down the wages of Australian workers had led to a highly regulated and bureaucratic temporary worker visa system, but exploitation of temporary migrant labour was still occurring — the worst of both worlds.
Grattan’s solution was to remove low-income work from the temporary visa system altogether. This would reduce exploitation of low-paid temporary migrant workers and also reduce competition for low-income Australian workers, particularly when employers could access easily exploited foreign workers, often unaware of their industrial rights and unable to access protections.
Under the existing system, ever more industries claim to be short of workers and need to be added to the list of critical skilled occupations, no matter how non-critical they might be, in an endless attempt to game an overly complex bureaucracy — one that can’t keep up with demand as it is.
With surging respiratory infections and businesses demanding their staff come to work and maximise their chances of getting infected, the time to fix a creaking temporary visa system might be closer than everyone thinks.
Pardon a naive question: where would the masses of foreign workers find accommodation? The rental market is beyond tight even for locals.
Probably tents, if business has its way.
Nah – the streets of Melbourne CBD (and, I presume, the other capital cities) are empty at night. There’s plenty of room there for the masses to doss down.
Workers can stay in the Office.
No need to have other accommodation. No travel expenses.
Business Lobby Groups would love it, they’d probably say it increases Productivity as well.
Sleep under their machines….
And it would only be fair that business is compensated for providing this accommodation. I imagine a fair rent would roughly equal the salary paid, so both amounts (salary and rent) can be netted off. And the businesses can store the worker’s passports offsite for safekeeping (for a nominal storage fee of course).
And pay rent for it.
And feed.
Perth’s new quarantine facility apparently ?
https://www.news.com.au/national/politics/new-use-touted-for-perth-quarantine-facility-as-wa-reopens-to-tourism-overseas-workers/news-story/2ee96883e4316aa7016ffda4c929f57e
Can’t have workers lounging around at home, not doing stuff. Far better having them in the office not doing stuff. Regardless of the studies showing that productivity generaly goes up when allowed to work from home, Australia’s businesses, run by an unimaginative, inflexible, and unable to progress management class, insist on the status quo. Are these people too stupid to realise they could save money on their office accomodation? Seems that way.
Those CBD office towers built on debt aren’t going to pay for themselves (except perhaps are vertical farms of high value horticulture – the water & climate control is already on tap).
A system that requires a captive customer base with a captive workforce – neither capable of self sufficiency – has been the dream of autocrats for at least five millennia.
Just needs a few more tweaks to hum like a well oiled machine – untended by those irritating soft machines with their demand to be treated as having more value.
After two years of successfully working from home, everyone in my team got an email on Monday totally out of the blue last week: “Everyone is expected to come into the office on Wednesday as we are now making a permanent return to on-site work.” No prior discussion, no notice. Well, obviously that went down like a lead balloon. Come Wednesday, no one showed up. Honestly, I really wonder sometimes if a criterion for being a manager is to have wool between your ears.
The function of most middle management is to manage the make-work of other middle managers.
At least it keeps them off the streets.
I think places are realising that they can mandate all they want, people will just not go. They will either not turn up, or say they have a sore throat/cough. The end. Unless the hassle and risk of going to work is outweighed by the benefits of being at work, people will not go.
OMG I love it BOOM
How delightful is Jennifer Westacott? She just cannot understand why so many think that their health and welfare is more important than business, ungrateful sods. She is the epitome of the neoliberal delusion that we all live in an economy, not in a society and communities.
Jennifer, like any true blue Conservative, believes that we live, not in an economy, but for the economy.
Imagine if she and the group for which she spruiks were to disappear from the face of the planet the increase in the sum total of human happiness would be incalculable.
All too often the problem is the terms of the employment rather than there being a shortage of suitably qualified people to do the job.